Saturday, February 5, 2011

River Run

I haven't said much about my 2011 health/fitness goals here, because I write about them regularly on The Skinny, the very cool weight-loss blog I co-author with my daughter, Katie, and a few of her very cool friends and relations.

But I will just say that 2011 is:
The Year That Kathy Becomes A Runner.

This morning Mark and I went for a 2-mile jog along the Clackamas River. Most of the people we saw along the way were fishing (Mark wanted to be one of them) or walking their dogs (neither of us wanted to be one of them). We did pass two other couples who were out jogging, like us.

Like US?!

After we had passed the umpteenth pair of dog walkers, I said to Mark, "You know who we are?"

"A hazard on the trail?" he guessed.

"No, silly," I replied. "We are now runner people. Remember when we used to be out walking and we'd see people running, and we'd think, 'we are not those people?' Well, now we ARE those people."

Amazing. I am signed up to run a 5-K race in April. And I'll be running it, not walking.

Why I Write

Kathy Haynie writes as witness to the mundane and miraculous, the holy and hilarious. She is matriarch to an astonishingly large blended family: 1 husband, 9 children, and 25 grandchildren, which attests to possibility, complexity, agony, and joy. But most especially, joy.